Carolyn Kane is an aficionado of synthetic color in new media art. She also writes about art and technology, makes videos, and teaches new media theory at New York University. She has previously written for *Leonardo*; *Theory, Culture and Society*; and *New Media and Society*. Her video art has been shown in Canada, the U.S., Australia, and Europe. Carolyn is a PhD candidate at NYU, where she is writing about color systems in computer art from 1965 until the present.

Artist Dan Graham (born 1942) has embraced a wide range of media and genres including film, video, performance, installation, architecture (he collaborated with Jeff Wall in 1989 to build Children’s Pavilion), women’s magazines (Figurative—made in 1965 and reproduced in Harper’s Bazaar in 1968), and rock music (where he has collaborated with musicians such as Glenn Branca and Sonic Youth). Graham is well known for his documentary Rock My Religion (1982-84), a fifty-two minute video that explores the religious and spiritual tendencies underlying the American obsession with rock music. In the exhibition catalog for Don’t Trust Anyone Over Thirty, Diedrich Diederichsen claims that this video is “one of the most important texts on the theory of rock music.” Rock My Religion, as well as many other of these interdisciplinary projects are included in Graham’s current solo show, Dan Graham: Beyond, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

Artist Brody Condon will be exhibiting and presenting a performance of his recent work Without Sun (2008) on July 18, 2009 at Machine Project in Los Angeles. Without Sun (2008) is 15-minute single channel videotape comprised of a series of performances found on the Internet. The tape displays several young people on psychedelic drugs, recounting and documenting, to the best of their ability, their experience for the camera.

The title, Without Sun is inspired by Chris Marker’s classic experimental documentary, Sans Soleil (1983), a film which examines the fallibility of human memory. For Condon, Marker’s piece invokes questions of “faulty and mediated” memory, as well as the theme of travel as a “travelogue [and] destabilization.” From here, Condon explains, the “relevance to kids taking inner journeys and recording themselves then posting the vid[eo] online to preserve the moment seemed clear.”

A transcript of Without Sun can be found on Condon’s website. It reads like a list of utterances without meaning. For instance, phrases such as, “it’s trying to spiral me all in it with it man. Oh. Uh uh. Ahhhh. What the fuck?” Or, “But there is something. Weird. This is weird. You can’t even begin. Everything feels nuts. Like touching stuff….” In another sequence, a young boy in his room explains to the camera, “I don’t even. I’m not controlling my hands. (laugh) this is going to be the best video ever I can already tell. Because. I mean. Ayyy. I forgot there was even …” The incomprehensibility of the phrases are just what you might expect from someone on such a psychedelic journey.

Image: Brody Condon, Without Sun, 2008 (Still)

However, reading them as a transcription shifts the focus--when one reads one expects trajectory ...

Does free video uploading and downloading equal democracy? I asked myself this question during the recent Open Video Conference, organized by the Information Society Project at the Yale Law School and the Open Video Alliance, an umbrella coalition for the development of an “open video ecosystem”: a “movement to promote free expression and innovation in online video.” Conference sponsors include Mozilla, Redhat, Intelligent Television, and Livestream. The conference was held at New York University’s Vanderbilt Hall, home of the NYU Law School from June 19-21, 2009. I attended several of the panels at the conference, although it was primarily Yochai Benkler’s opening keynote that was of concern.

Roxana Pérez-Méndez is a multi-media performance artist who works closely on the fragility of contemporary identity. Her recent piece, Caridad (April, 2009) is on display this week during No Soul For Sale at the Philadelphia-based nonprofit artist collective and gallery Vox Populi's space on the fourth floor. Caridad is a intricate installation that combines DVD video, a pepper-ghost hologram, and model dingy boat and mechanical fan. - Carolyn Kane

Can you tell me about this work and this strange screen?

A pepper-ghost hologram is a two-way glass mirror that was originally developed in 1860s and used for creating illusions, known as “ghosts,” in theatrical performances. It was also used up by Disney in their production of the Haunted Mansion. The peppers ghost screen acts as both a mirror and reflecting medium, simultaneously producing reality and illusion.

The first aspect of the installation is my performance, a continuous shot of me rowing. This performance was shot on green screen with the background removed in post-production. The image is then played on a DVD and monitor that is reflected onto the pepper screen, at a 45-degree angle. Next, on the other side of the screen there is a model dingy boat, mechanical fan, and blue strips of paper that fly like moving water. This scene is also reflected in the two-way mirror, but from the reverse side. In short, both sides are caught in the center of the same image, sandwiched there, giving the illusion, and producing the reality, of being one.

This triangular structure is also echoed thematically. From a frontal point of view, the pepper screen appears to convey only one image ...

Renowned light artist James Turrell (1943, Los Angeles) was first associated with the American Minimalists that emerged in the 1960s such as Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and Frank Stella. Today Turrell is known more as an installation artist who uses colored lights to sculpt space and disorient perception. Currently Turrell lives in Flagstaff, Arizona, near the Navaho reservations, where he continues to oversee the completion of his monumental land art project at Roden Crater, an extinct volcano that the artist has “been transforming into a sky observatory for over three decades. In honor of the recently opened James Turrell Museum in Colomé, Argentina, the only museum worldwide dedicated specifically to the artist's career, this article discusses highlights from Turrell’s rich body of work and introduces the new Turrell Museum, where many of these pieces reside.